Hadas Gold received anti-Semitic threats during the 2016 presidential campaign and believes the press' obligation to report truth can help people overcome political divides.

A journalist who got her start penning articles for Scottsdale's Desert Mountain High School student newspaper recently joined CNN.

Hadas Gold graduated from Desert Mountain in2006 and was in a newsroom as a full-time journalist six years later. Amid the nation's political divides, she says accurate reporting can help people find the truth when overblown rhetoric abounds.

As a media critic for Politico through the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, she garnered widespread attention and support when a reader made threatening remarks toward her on social media.

The 29-year-old says she was drawn to journalism from an early age as her parents religiously listened to NPR and watched broadcast reports such as "20/20" and "60 Minutes."

And she's not shying away now, despite an abundance of "fake news" labels and other criticisms lobbed at the national news media from the president on down.

Gold said incidents like the one she faced, the shooting of U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise and the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, show that hate eclipses political affiliation.

"People are always saying, 'One part of the political spectrum is racist,' or whatever," Gold said. "I don’t ascribe to that ... These tragic events and the journalism that records them will be pivotal points as we look back on this time period."

Truth and accuracy are tools to help people overcome political divides, Gold said. Her obligation to report the truth is the first step in overcoming hate, she said.

Cub reporter in Scottsdale

Gold was born in Tel Aviv. Her family moved to Scottsdale from Minnesota when she was 3 years old for her father's work.

As a kid, Gold recalls sneaking behind the family staircase after bedtime to catch glimpses of "20/20" with Diane Sawyer while her parents watched.

"As a little girl, seeing another woman do really important news stories was really important for me," she said.

She joined Desert Mountain's school newspaper, the Wolf's Print, as soon as she could, eventually becoming an editor.

Kyle Ross, now a principal in Chandler, taught Gold's high school journalism class back then.

"I wasn’t aware of the ranks she had risen to in Politico until a year or two ago when I saw it on Facebook, but I wasn’t surprised," he said. "She was extremely hardworking and very intelligent."

Hadas was a strong leader and editor of a great group of kids, Ross said.

"It wasn’t like teaching a class, it was just like supervising a bunch of journalists," he said.

Gold participated in Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School high school program, which allows teens to live in university dorms for two weeks and get experience creating newscasts.

At 18, she headed to Washington D.C., to study at George Washington University. Gold landed an entry-level job at Politico a couple of months before completing graduate school in 2012 with a degree in media and public affairs.

NEWSLETTERS

Get the AZ Memo newsletter delivered to your inbox

We're sorry, but something went wrong

Get the pulse of Arizona -- Local news, in-depth state coverage and what it all means for you

Four years later, she was covering the media during the presidential campaign.

Facing hate, anti-Semitism

In October 2016, Gold became the target of a graphic anti-Semitic message on Twitter from a so-called Donald Trump supporter.

"Don't mess with our boy Trump or you will be first in line for the camp," the message said, accompanied by a doctored image of Gold, with a superimposed Star of David on her shirt and a bullet hole in her forehead.

She called it a PG-rated version of threats she has received.

The hate and anti-Semitism can be frightening, but she said she wasn't surprised.

"As a reporter, we often get people calling us 'libtards' or any kind of political slur," she said. "But in the last few months and during the election ... it started to get a little bit more personal, more racial and more about a person’s gender or nationality or religion. And it’s a little frightening."

Although she received wide-ranging support after the threat garnered attention because of itsoptics, she said it wasn't that different from the hate and anti-Semitism she regularly receives.

The Anti-Defamation League found last October that hate toward Jewish journalists increased in 2016. Social media users sent out 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets targeted at 800 Jewish journalists around the world.

Moving beyond hate

Gold said none of the hate mail she received ever presented a real threat.

"I don’t want to say it’s something you just have to deal with, but the internet is both wonderful and not wonderful. You have to kind of take the good with the bad and react appropriately when it does seem serious," she said. "It used to be a lot harder, you had to sit down and write a hate letter to somebody and it was a little bit easier to track where it came from."

As a journalist, Gold said it is important not to get bogged down by the rhetoric and to stay focused on accurately reporting the news.

And people should evaluate the ways they get news and make sure they're getting news from myriad sources to understand many different points of view, she said.

"Hopefully people will, just like their diet, make it varied and read and watch from a lot of different places," Gold said. "Because you’re going to get different types of news from different places."